This disclosure relates generally to online systems storing identity information for users, and in particular to grouping users into tiers based upon a computed similarity score to a group of seed users.
Certain online systems, such as social networking systems, allow their users to connect to and to communicate with other online system users. Users may create profiles on such an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of these types of online systems and the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by such online systems, an online system provides an ideal forum for entities to increase awareness about products or services by presenting sponsored content to online system users.
Presenting sponsored content to users of an online system allows an entity sponsoring the content to gain public attention for products or services and to persuade online system users to take an action regarding the entity's products, services, opinions, or causes. Generally, these entities each have websites accessible to online system users. However, these entities generally do not have access to the identity information that an online system, such as a social networking system, stores and associates with users, which can be a wealth of valuable targeting information about these users. This limitation of the information available to entities providing sponsored content makes it difficult for them to effectively identify sponsored content to provide to the online system for presentation to various users and to identify which group of users is the optimal to target with this sponsored content.
In other words, the entity is limited in its ability to most efficiently target the sponsored content as the entity has less ability to identify those users of the online system that would respond in a cost effective way to the sponsored content, e.g., those users who would provide a positive return on investment that the entity makes in presenting the sponsored content to the user.